Raspberries and Empty Kegs

Bad news first: we're out of kegged beer.......We'll let that breath for a second.........

Ok. We're back: We were worreid it would happen and it did. With the hiatus in brewing because of the move, the lapse has finally caught up and our kegerator is empty. The brown went about 3 days ago and the Belgian went last night. Fortunately, we've got a decent amount of dubbels and rye saison's left to last, but only 6 steam beers and no hoppy beers. The Double Pale has been in primary for 1 week now and is probably finished fermenting. We'll let the yeast clean up after themselves for a few days and then we are planning on cold crashing on Wednesday this week. After 3 days at 38, we'll keg it and add dry hop with 1oz of Citra and 0.5 oz Chinook. We'll leave it at room temp for 4 days (normally I like 7, but we need to rush things), then into the kegerator, then hopefully by next Wednesday it will be close enough carbonation-wise to start drinking.

Now good news:

We've finally gotten around to adding the raspberries to our Russian Imperial Stout. I could not find the canned raspberry puree this year, so we got about 3 lbs of frozen raspberries and let them thaw in the fridge. We then put them in a half gallon of water and raised the temp to about 160 F to hopefully pseudo-pasteurize as well as mash them up a bit to get the juices flowing.

The beer is now sitting in the shower (the garage gets a little too hot during the day for my tastes) and will stay there for 7-10 days. We'll sample it after a week and then decide when to bottle. I think this year we might have to do something different than normal to avoid the overcarbonation problem we had last year. My guess was that the bottling yeast ate the sugars in the raspberries which resulted in the excess CO2. It looks like there is a small amount of bubbling going on now, which could mean a little bit of fermentation (which I doubt because the beer has sat so long the yeast are probably pretty dead) or its just some extra gas escaping.

Next up is the Black IPA a week from today and then probably the week after that we'll do the Saison. I dont have the ingredients but I think we should brew the Belgian Pale again as it seems to be a crowd pleaser.